29 July Weekly Garden Update

Red Pontiacs

Harvests!!

Red Potatoes – the remainder of the box which we’ve been continuously digging from as we have wanted ‘taters. Includes a volunteer plant in last year’s potato box which yielded 2 medium sized red potatoes.

Haricot vert & old dutch 1/2 runner green beans

Pick Me!

The first pimiento peppers and some serranos, Red jalapenos (they turn red if you leave them on the plant long enough), habaneros, cayennes, and red cherry bomb peppers.

We fish emulsioned everything this week and restarted a few cauliflower starts that didn’t germinate. We seeded 3 varieties of carrots in one of the long boxes after adding fertilizer, epsom salts, and boron and working it. Hopefully we’ll have a fall harvest of carrots. It’s all dependent on how hot the summer is (whether the seedlings can get up and going without it being too hot for them henceforth). We also started 4 seeds of cabbage directly into their growing space. We did some weeding in the garden aisles – while not a favorite task it typically only needs doing a couple of times a year. We’ll be getting more mulch in a couple of weeks, and then the weeding will go down even more.

We started hardening off the fall yellow squash and the cucumber seedlings early in the week and transplanted them out on Saturday.

Monkey Tail Peas

Nope, the harvest isn’t over yet

She had been watching a particular tomato for the past 2 weeks (it is visible from her desk inside) – it had caught her fancy as sometimes things do. If you’ve seen a single tomato in pictures in the past couple of weeks, that’s it. It was *just* ready to pick, and on the day she went out to see if it was ready, it was (of course) gone. In a huff she searched around and found it on the ground, partially chewed on. Those damn squirrels (her words) tend to be wasteful. Her disappointment was similar to that of a small child who waits all day for something that she thinks parents have promised to do (when they don’t remember it at all). She is still indignant.

We removed the last yellow squash plant. Although the patty pan squash main stems are really just completely disintegrated due to SVB damage, the plants are still flowering and making some squash – mostly because they put down roots on some of the stems.

The end of japanese beetle season plus lower temperatures (only in the 90s) allowed the old dutch half-runner beans to begin producing again. These were also the ones that got hit by deer a few weeks ago.

There were a couple of “oops” moments while trimming tomatoes and cucumbers. Only 3 green tomatoes were prematurely “picked”. The cucumber oops ended up taking out a lot a plant.

I noticed that one of the eggplant blooms had fallen to the ground. The eggplant this year is disappointing. They’ve generally recovered from the flea beetle onslaught but one that has actually made a fruit is looking weak and none are setting flowers well. Perhaps it’s just the weather but none of the plants are as healthy as the ones last year. However, cucumber beetles and stink bugs are only a fraction of what they were last year. We think that this is due to a) we’ve been diligent about removing dead squash leaves, but also b) the “community” garden across the road (about 1/4 mile away) ceased to exist this year. We can’t help but think that part of the problem was caused by folks new to sustainable gardening not doing due diligence in keeping pest problems down.

I didn’t realize that the monkey tail cow peas turn light brown only once they’ve dried so we were surprised to open a fully formed but fresh pod to find light-colored peas. We’ll be saving out a few peas from each harvest for next year’s seed needs.

On Tuesday we started 5 porch rail containers on the front (north) porch. There’s less direct sun there so we’re doing cilantro and lettuce (several varieties). We also started fall kales and mustard in the basement: 14 plants total from 6 lacinato kale, 4 red winter kale, and 4 southern giant curled mustard.

We are inundated with cucumbers! We have way too many this year (of course, last year we had a dismal harvest). We have made refrigerator pickles multiple times, given cucumbers away, and eaten them regularly and often and we still have some we don’t know what to do with. (We like to slice them with vinegar & soy, or with sour cream and vinegar).

Cayenne Peppers

We dried a couple trays of cayenne pappers. The new oven dries them even better than the old oven. Later we will grind them to make our own cayenne powder, from which I also make a hot pepper basting sauce.

On Friday strong thunderstorms came through. We got almost 2 inches in rain in a bit over an hour. Again last night we got more, including another 1.5 inches of rain.

New plants

We removed the older cucumber vines yesterday. They were basically “done” and had some sort of disease. Just in time to save us from drowning in cucumbers. We still have straight eight cucumber vines. These were the ones that didn’t germinate inside, so we reseeded directly in the spring. We transplanted out the 5 new boston pickling cucs and the 3 yellow squash plants that we started in the basement on 7/7. We planted the 3 squash at the northerly side of the box because the plants that were growing here earlier this season all showed a marked tendency to want to grow towards the south due to the sun.

We removed some of the oldest haricot vert plants as we harvested this latest batch. They’re all quickly reaching the end of production, but more are coming along that we seeded at the beginning of June.

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This entry was posted on July 29, 2012 at 11:34 am and is filed under Garden. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Just found your blog. Love the Carolina gardening blogs. I am psyched to see a pic of the monkey tail beans. I am loving my pink eye purple hulls this year and want to try some more field peas next year.

Know just how she feels about the squirrel taking the tomato. I lost my first eggplant, and a pretty one at that, to some critter. Monkey tails peas, I am guessing it is a shelling peas. How did it get that name?